Fail Stew

Of all the recipes I bookmarked over the weekend, I was most anxious to try the Beef and Guinness Stew. Unfortunately, when I went to the store to pick up the ingredients, I found that they only sell Guinness in six packs. I admit this makes sense because people normally drink their beer. But neither Sweetie nor I drink beer, or any other kind of alcohol, so unless I loved the recipe so much that I planned to make it 6 times in the near future (with 8 servings per batch), it didn't make sense for me. So no Guinness. Which is probably why this great potential fall staple turned into a Fail Stew.

Oh, it looked gorgeous. And the meat was deliciously tender, it smelled delicious while cooking, and the flavor was quite nice, if not particularly special. But without the Guinness, there was nothing to disguise the flavor of this thing:


A turnip. I had never eaten turnips before. It wasn't until I cut into it and smelled it that it occurred to me this vegetable is part of the mustards (or cabbage) family, very closely related to radishes. And I hate radishes. The pithy part is fine, but the skin is bitter. So when I ate this bowl last night...


...I hated half of it. The turnip half. Parsnips, carrots, beef, sauce, all good. But the turnip ruined it for me. Maybe it wouldn't have if the soup didn't take 3 hours to make. If I'm going to invest that much time into hovering, stirring, and adjusting temperatures, I'd better love every bite of that stew, doggone it.

I loved a few things about this recipe that have made me consider trying again--with potatoes instead. For one thing, it uses caraway seeds, which are my absolute favorite savory spice (it also makes rye bread the perfect accompaniment, and I love rye bread). For another, the cooking method, though tedious, resulted in the perfect falling-apart-but-still-chewy texture of meat.

I'm not sure what to do about the Guinness, though. I just substituted water in this first-go-round, but I'm sure that gave the final result less depth than it should have had. Any suggestions for substitutes?

Chocolate, Chocolate Chip Muffins

Usually, I hold desserts masquerading as real foods in the highest contempt. Nobody would consider a cupcake a healthy breakfast option, but call it a "muffin" and it's suddenly socially sanctioned. However, I am guilty of occasionally craving such "muffins" that are essentially junk--particularly of the blueberry or chocolate varieties.

During my recent patrol of Cooking Light, I bookmarked a recipe for a German chocolate cake. But cakes usually don't fare well in this apartment, because I'm the only one eating them, and they go dry after a few days. Cupcakes are a better option, because they can be frozen and thawed over several weeks while remaining moist and soft. But since I already had various desserts sitting around, I couldn't really justify a whole batch of cupcakes on top of it. Solution: cut down the sugar, use healthy fats and white whole wheat flour, skip the frosting and--just like despicable grocery store bakers everywhere--call it a muffin instead.

Chocolate, Chocolate Chip Muffins
Adapted from a Cooking Light recipe for German Chocolate Cake

-1/4 cup cocoa
-1 tbsp chocolate chips
-1/4 cup boiling water
-2/3 cup sugar
-2.5 tbsp canola oil
-2 tbsp plain fat-free yogurt
-1 tsp vanilla
-1 egg
-1 cup + 2 tablespoons white whole wheat flour
-1 teaspoon baking powder
-1/4 teaspoon baking soda
-1/4 teaspoon salt
-1/2 cup light soy milk
-1/2 tbsp lemon juice
-1/4 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350° F. In a small bowl, mix the cocoa and chocolate. Pour in the boiling water and stir until the chips have melted. In a larger mixing bowl, stir the sugar and canola oil together, then mix in the yogurt, vanilla, and egg. Separately, combine the flour, leavenings, and salt. Measure out the soy milk and pour in the lemon juice to create a buttermilk substitute. Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients, alternating with the "buttermilk." Pour in the cocoa mixture and mix well.


Fold in the chocolate chips. Spoon into sprayed muffin liners and bake for 20 minutes.



I <3 aluminum wrappers. They're pretty and come off so cleanly!


(Of course...you have to take them off before you put the muffins in the microwave!)

These are just sweet enough that they don't feel like a "healthy substitute" for real chocolate, but not so sweet that you feel like rinsing your mouth out afterwards. I'm sure the recipe would hold up well to other add-ins, like dried cranberries (soaked in hot water to plump before baking), chopped nuts, or anything else that goes well with chocolate.

Chèvre Stuffed Chicken Breasts

Yesterday, I ran out of things to do on the internet. Shocking, I know. But as I'd done all I could for the time being to my comics site, I'd caught up on all the news and blogs I'd missed, and I'll be starting a job next week that literally centers around web development, I figured it was best to take a break. And you know what that means: baking day!

Over the course of the day I baked a batch of bagels, bran muffins, chocolate chocolate-chip muffins, and rye bread. I won't inundate today's post with pictures of all of them, because I'll need something to post for the next week when I start school and eat PB&J every day! I'll just focus on the crowning glory of the weekend, which wasn't a baked good at all.

While Sweetie was getting his back-to-school haircut, I swept around Kroger picking up ingredients that weren't strictly staples to my refrigerator...which is rare. Earlier I was sucked into the vortex of Cooking Light, which spawned a grocery list of things I rarely buy or have never bought before, like scallions and turnips. There are no turnips in the chicken, but those mini-onions were put to quick use.

Chèvre Stuffed Chicken Breasts
Adapted from Cooking Light

-Olive oil
-3/4 cup chopped shallots (2 regular-sized, or 1 large)
-1 teaspoon sugar
-1/2 tablespoon minced garlic
-1/3 cup crumbled Chèvre
-oregano to taste
-4 (6-ounce) skinless, boneless chicken breast halves
-3/4 cup fat-free chicken broth
-1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
-black pepper

Heat the oil in a saucepan and saute 1/2 cup of the shallots, sugar, and garlic, until the shallots are limp and caramelized. Remove from heat and stir in the Chèvre and oregano.


Cut a slit into the largest part of each chicken breast and stuff with a fourth of the cheese mixture. Add more oil to the pan and heat, then add chicken breasts and fry until browned on both sides.


Mix the broth and vinegar and pour over the chicken along with the rest of the shallots; boil until the chicken is cooked through and the liquid has reduced to a thin sauce.


Sprinkle the meat with black pepper and serve over brown rice, with the sauce poured on top. Makes 4 servings.


See the goat cheese oozing out onto the rice?


Sweetie said the rice could have used some additional seasoning, but the sauce certainly helped. Maybe I'll cook it in chicken broth next time.

In the original recipe, the chicken was cooked separately from the sauce, but the breasts I purchased were abnormally large...although this seems to be the new "normal." Since when did 3 breasts make 2 whole pounds of meat? In order to make 4 portions, I had to do some creative carving, and the meat was still too thick to cook through by pan-frying only. Simmering in the sauce allowed me to cook them thoroughly without drying out. I did hate an issue with cheese leakage into the broth, but it didn't hurt anything in the end.

The original recipe also called for sun-dried tomatoes in the stuffing, and used a lot more vinegar in both the stuffing and sauce. Though I love both in my dishes, I thought they would overwhelm the flavor of the cheese and chicken itself. I really like Cooking Light's recipes, but they do tend to have a heavy hand with bold flavors like vinegar, soy sauce, etc. Maybe when I get older and my taste buds go south I'll make them as rote, but for now I'll use the bottle sparingly.

Chevre and Fall

Verdict on Chèvre cheese: I'd read that Chèvre was like cream cheese, but that is not the case for any dimension except consistency. Chèvre is strong and smoky, like the raw "cheese" flavor that underlies all the other kinds of cheeses--if that makes sense. I won't say I dislike it, because it always takes a while to get to like a new kind of cheese. I hated Gruyère at first, because it was weirdly sweet, but after a few tastes it really grew on me, to the point that I don't think I can make macaroni and cheese with plebeian cheddar ever again.

Yesterday, I had the Chèvre on a toasted whole wheat roll with mesquite turkey and blackberry jam:


The turkey and jam have pretty bold flavors themselves, so I wonder if the cheese would taste better paired with milder ingredients.

There's not much to tell food-wise about my Friday...after Sweetie came home from work I baked up our traditional pizza with pineapples and mushrooms on my side--I've sadly given up the turkey pepperoni because my stomach couldn't handle the spice. After a night of slaving over a project for a local group and watching Sweetie battle penguin-shaped blips from 1986, the aforementioned stomach was miffed that I hadn't had any protein with dinner.


There's protein in the soy milk that went into this chocolate pudding pie, so there.

Finally, the weather has been cooling down around here. It's still in the 80s, but the humidity has died down to the point that shade actually behaves like shade! With the undergrads clogging up the streets and classes starting next week, it seems that summer is almost officially over. Usually I'd be sad. But, as my general absence from this blog and the few Debbie Downer posts I managed to write over the past few months attest, this was not a happy summer. Draggy classes, hospitals, supervisors from hell and eating issues...but it's on the up and up for autumn. Who is in the clear, I quit that job and secured another in a much happier place (pays $1 more per hour, too, which is a big difference when you're talking about hourly jobs that eek out barely over minimum wage), I killed the cake cravings, and aside from the anticipated tedium of Reference, my classes should be much more pleasant when I have a reasonable time frame to do the assigned work.

Plus, I'm so ready for autumn eats. Blueberry overload is well and good, but I'm getting antsy for some pumpkin oats and rib-sticking stews.

The Return of the Ramen (and Other Staples)

So here's the scoop: I am officially ten pounds heavier than I was in April. Did I freak out when I felt the numbers creeping up? At first, yes, because I was afraid that once they started growing they just wouldn't stop. But now, no, because as I was strolling through Kroger yesterday looking at all the goodies, I knew it was [more or less] over. The "formerly forbidden" foods simply did not appeal, and some of them made me feel ill to look at. I charged in there expecting to pick up chocolate cake, and left with carrots instead.

I'll spare you the details of the junk I've been sampling over the past month, not because I'm noble, but because I really can't remember most of it, thanks to a little defensive mechanism in my reptilian brain. In the spectrum of blank memory vs. obsession, I prefer the former. I do remember this though:


A white cake with real, honest-to-goodness sugar-and-fat frosting. I haven't eaten anything like this since my first year of college, when a dorm-mate received one for her birthday and was too proud of her ability to shop for jeans in the kids' section of Target to eat it herself. I bought it to put the craving to rest once and for all, and though I accomplished the goal I don't think it was quite what the authors of Intuitive Eating had in mind. They were angling for a psychological effect, in which the "forbidden" edge is taken off, but instead this cake made me the sickest I've felt since I started birth control and a round of antibiotics on the same day in 2007. Like the Christmas ham + stomach flu incident of winter '06 (this paragraph's full of nostalgia, eh?), just looking at the fork with purple smudges on it made me wretch for a day afterwards. Bottom line: no more Kroger cake for me.

Back to the original topic: I don't think I'll be losing the 10 pounds just yet, or at all. 5 maybe, if it happens naturally. I'm still in a healthy weight range according to the government, my clothes still fit, and in the grand scheme of things I'm lighter than I was in middle school. But I should still work on getting back to healthy eating, sans bad experimental cake. Step One: Back to the Basics. Yesterday marked the return of the turkey & hummus & colby jack on a homemade whole wheat roll for lunch:


With an unpictured strawberry-banana smoothie, because my throat is still itchy.

For dinner I dove into an enormous bowl of beauty:


Ramen! In Tamara World, we detox with flash-fried noodles. And broccoli, carrots, mushrooms, and chicken sauteed with chili garlic...all submerged in a white miso broth. Take that, carb-haters.

Finally, this morning I had the luxury of a clean kitchen, thanks to some buzzing fruit flies that needed to be nipped. When my kitchen is clean, I'm more likely to cook breakfast instead of just throwing some bran flakes in bowl.


Strawberries 'n Cream oatmeal! There was actually no cream, but soy milk does sweeten it up. When I was little one of my favorite breakfasts was the Quaker packets with dehydrated sugared-up strawberry bits...I need not point out the superiority of fresh berries.

For lunch today I'm going to open a new kind of cheese I've never tried before: Chèvre. I bought it a while ago but got sidetracked with the Gruyère, but I think it's about time the goats had their turn in the spotlight.

Slow and Steady

I'm not running any races, but this tortoise is adopting a semi-new outlook on getting back into healthy habits. The urge is strong to "cleanse" after indulging all of that week, whipping my eating and exercise patterns into Puritan-level shape. But as the authors of Intuitive Eating say, that would be basically putting myself into a diet mindset. And dieting is what got me into this mess int he first place!

So instead of swan diving into a new "regimen," I'm still going to eat a lot and push myself relatively little. I'll just make sure that "lot" is nutritious and that "little" is enough to banish lethargy.

Because of my scratchy throat, which makes me feel thirsty no matter how many glasses of water I drink, I've been starting each day with a craving for my favorite cold cereal:


Raisin Bran is for suckers. The generic costs 1/4 the price, and when I add my own raisins I get the sweet chew without all of the added sugar Kellogg soaks theirs in.

Lunches have been high in sodium, but when I was little this was considered a good thing for killing germs in the throat.


Half a can + a homemade roll + half a carton of 2% Fage with fresh strawberries. It took me about 2 hours to eat this "lunch" in pieces, because I was drawing comics all the while. Bad blogger. But let's leave that bad habit for later.

Before hopping on the treadmill in the afternoon I ate an Active Lifestyle high fiber granola bar...basically the Kroger version of a chewy Fiber One bar. Yes, it was replete with "high maltose corn syrup," "partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil," and all manner of preservatives, and didn't even taste that good. But I bought it for the stay at Who's, since it would be a heck of a lot better than more apple danishes from Love's (Who used to be a trucker, and there's one of these near his campground, so he's partial to their products).

I'm actually in a lot better shape than I thought, as I managed to jog one half of the one mile I covered. That's pathetic by healthy blogger standards, but acceptable from the average American's perspective, I think.

Even though my lunch and snacks were ample, I was still apparently underfed, because come 6 o'clock my hands were literally shaking from low blood sugar. The jitters made it a little difficult to put this dinner together:


Sweetie had eaten at his annual departmental picnic, so I got to choose dinner all for myself :D Obviously, I took the opportunity to pounce on the vegetable drawer. I was really feeling like noodles in salty broth, but we were out, so my veggies and tofu went on top of rice instead.

After dinner I soothed my throat with a thick Green Monster of half a frozen banana, frozen peaches and strawberries, and spinach. Later I made sure to take in my daily treat: a dark chocolate peanut butter brownie.


I made a half batch of brownies using canola oil and white whole wheat flour, putting the batter into a full-size pan, then took 1/4 cup of creamy peanut butter and mixed it with sugar and soy milk until it made a spreadable topping, before baking. The result is like a brownie-blondie hybrid. You can't taste the peanut butter much, but you can smell it, and it ups the satisfaction factor.

Finally, the weather has cooled a little outside. I might actually venture out of the house today...I have a big deposit of federal loan money that needs to be spent on the last fruits of summer.

Finally, Some Food

The inevitable happened--as it always does. After a week of visiting germ-saturated hospital rooms and downing high-sugar, low-nutrient foods, I got sick. Without the proper guards of vegetables and exercise, the pesky viruses had the upper hand, and I am now dependent on aspirin, eye drops, and honey-lemon lozenges for minimum comfort. If I'm ever tempted to say "no" to real meals and "yes" to bologna and last year's Christmas M&M's instead, somebody please remind me what this throbbing behind my right eye feels like.

I wasn't completely terrible last week, though. I started each day with bowls like these:


See, fruit! Who had bought bananas and apples for me the weekend before, so I was sitting pretty until the bounty ran out. And when Sweetie and I drove back to Bloomington one night to pick up more supplies, I grabbed the ingredients for these lovely day-enders as well:



Beef & Cabbage Hot Pot made with beef broth from Who's cupboard. Unfortunately I was working with an unfamiliar stove and Kroger cut the meat too big, so it didn't turn out as tender and scrumptious as usual. At least I pumped some roughage into me and some beta carotene into Sweetie.


Spaghetti with meat sauce and mushrooms...this was actually better than I make at home, because Who invests in higher quality beef than I do. He had a pound of it in the fridge that would go bad in a few days if someone didn't cook it, so I helped myself :D

When I had the opportunity to use my own kitchen yesterday, I pounced on the bread machine.


I was feeling courageous and sprinkled some cheese on my side as well as Sweetie's, as you see. But since I have this cold and wasn't feeling too hot overall, I can't tell if that made me sick or if I've successfully built up a tolerance for it.

I've been chugging Green Monsters like mad since we came home, and putting fruits or vegetables into every meal to make up for lost time. I'm going to get back into walking/jogging slowly, because after a week of inactivity I'm certain to injure myself if I go all-out.

I hope everyone has a good start to the week!

Back in Bloomington

Well, either the family and medical professionals were being panicky or Who has the karma points of Gandhi, because not only is he now in a normal room with only one tube left in him, but he'll be free to go home in a couple of days. So after lounging around at his trailer all day, then doing loads of dishes and laundry so he'll have a nice clean place to return to, Sweetie and I have returned to Bloomington in a bittersweet state.

Of course it's great that he didn't die, and even better that he won't have to enter an assisted living facility and can live independently. But we're miffed at the relatives who raised such a fuss on Tuesday, ordering us to warp to the hospital right this second and lecturing us on how we didn't really understand the gravity of the situation. What on earth did we sacrifice a week of my vacation and Sweetie's wages for? The man will be watching golf on TV with a Coke in one hand and a can of Pringles in another by this time next month.

For the past four days I've been living off of bologna sandwiches and packaged pastries from Who's kitchen (in which nary a green thing thrives), and haven't had an ounce of exercise other than mowing his lawn and scrubbing his floors. My body is in a sorry, puffy state...but I'm really starting to think this is a good thing. Being thin makes for a stunning reflection in the mirror, but if a similar medical disaster befalls me, it's much better to have some padding around the organs. Because Who was so lean, they couldn't sew his stomach back up and had to add several tubes of nutrients to keep him on the brink of health. I've always said aloud that I should be concentrating on exercise and health instead of looks, but maybe after this it will finally sink in.

Update

Last Thursday I announced my triumphant return, but left the next day to spend the weekend in St. Paul with Who. After two days staring at golf balls soaring over the shoreline of Wisconsin, we returned to Bloomington satisfied that Sweetie had performed his duties as the first born. I was in a funk on Monday and didn't blog, planning to sum up the grilled yummies on Tuesday...when fate intervened.

On Tuesday evening Sweetie's cell phone started ringing ceaselessly with calls from every relative in southern Indiana. Who's ulcer had burst, and the doctors were trumpeting to get everyone to his bedside ASAP. We threw essentials in the car and drove straight back, while Sweetie played family counselor to relatives with a lot less contact with Who and a lot more guilt about it.

The ones who only see him at holidays, or who live in a big fuzzy cloud of denial, were shocked at his condition, but we weren't. As I've written before only half in jest, we always leave for St. Paul expecting to find Who keeled over on the floor with a hardened liver, blackened lungs, or broken bones from his habit of subsisting exclusively on Coke, Coors Lights, and menthol cigarettes (okay, maybe a pork chop or two). Who is not unaware of the consequences of his choices either, and had everything planned out with Sweetie months before. But we arrived in the dinkiest hospital I've ever seen to a crowd of nay-sayers and doom-sayers...ironically, the most put-together person there was and still is Who himself.

It's been almost 48 hours since Who's stomach perforated, and he's still conscious and kicking. His vitals are steady and he's amazingly coherent, considering the haze of morphine. He's in hell of course, with nurses forcing him to cough and move around to keep pneumonia bacteria and blood clots at bay and surgeons packing his stomach with antibiotic swabs. He can't so much as swallow water and has at least eight tubes delivering various substances to his circulatory system (including tons of proteins in a desperate attempt to make his body build itself back up, because he's so underweight). On the bright side, he hasn't had hallucinations from alcohol withdrawal and a patch should help with the nicotine. All things considered, he's doing okay. We don't want to clap our hands and say that's the end of it, because he's still in ICU and a lot of things can go wrong, but we're not tolling the church bell and raiding his heirlooms just yet.

We'll be camping out in St. Paul/Greensburg through Sunday at least, because regardless of the two routes Who's life could take (either continuing or ending) Sweetie, as the only biological child, will have a lot to take care of. If Who dies, we'll have to take care of funeral arrangements and execute his wishes. If he lives, we'll have to set him up in a nursing home, because he won't be able to eat solid food for months, and will need constant medical attention possibly for the rest of his life. Fortunately, Who was the head of maintenance at just such a home, so they'll just have to switch his status from employee to resident. It's a pretty nice place from what I've seen, with the looks of a classy hotel and a big television and Wii in the common area upstairs. Also fortunately for him, Veterans Assistance should take care of the hospital expenses and the nursing home fees.

There's the long and short of it. We're all set up here for the next few days, and I'll be visiting the Greensburg public library daily to check email and upload blog posts, if there's anything worth sharing. I hope everyone's summer is wrapping up well.

Freedom!

Today was my first full day after the end of the semester! My last class finished at 11:30 yesterday morning, after which I promptly conked out for the afternoon and spent my conscious moments doing as little as possible. I of course took some time to prepare food that wasn't stuffed into a green tortilla (which is surprisingly rare these days):


Usually I marinate the chicken in mustard and maple syrup before covering with panko and baking, but yesterday I felt like taking a walk on the wild side with some ranch dressing instead. The result smelled a little off, but tasted just fine.

This morning I woke up full of energy from all that nothingness, but also with a puzzling queasiness in my stomach. My body was probably confused from waking up after a night without school-induced stress-eating :o The only food that sounded appealing to me was Rice Krispies in soy milk (actually, I had a hankering for Cheerios, which I haven't eaten since I was about 8, but Rice Krispies were on the shelf from my experiments with "Clif bars," so I snap, crackled, and popped away). After inhaling my fiber-less bowl of air I had the overwhelming urge to attack the kitchen floor with a sponge. The kitchen floor led to the living room floor (not with the sponge, naturally), which led to the bathroom, where the sink needed a scrub as well...before I knew it it was lunch time, my arms were useless, and all I had in my stomach was the remnants of a Blueberry Crisp Clif Bar gobbled down between the ammonia and wood cleaner.


(Source)
Since I was already on a nostalgia roll, I fixed a bowl of cheesy pasta using whole wheat penne, soy milk in the rue, half a chopped Roma tomato and the last of my block of Gruyère.


Kraft, it was not.

The afternoon was sucked into the vortex of errands and exercise. A green monster made with dark cherries may have made an appearance as well, to counteract the effects of the oven that is southern Indiana. For dinner I obliterated the days' work by making a splatter&stain-happy dish of sweet & sour chicken over brown rice.



The camera made the sauce look a lot more orange and "cheddar-like" that it really was; it was actually a pretty red thanks to artificial coloring doused liberally into the cop-out store-bought sauce I stirred into the chicken broth & cornstarch.

Dessert was a chocolate-cherry Luna protein bar, which went on sale this week at Kroger for $1 a piece :D Now I am suitably exhausted and looking forward to another free day tomorrow before being whisked away to internet-less Greensburg for the weekend. Perhaps I'll use the time to catch up on all the blogs I've missed over the past few weeks!

Video Games Live

I started out yesterday with my first fully home-made pancake. I was really craving butter (well, Smart Balance at least) and maple syrup, but didn't have any multigrain mix left, so I followed this recipe, just because it was one of the first results that popped up on Google.


There are actually two pancakes stacked on top of each other there...very large pancakes. Since I cut the recipe down to a single serving, but had to use one whole egg, it tasted a little "eggy," but if I called it "crepe-like" all was well :D

After our traditional Saturday lunch of home-baked pizza, I published a new comic and jogged two miles on the treadmill. And when I say "jogged," I actually mean "jog" now! A few weeks ago "jogged" would have meant "mostly walked, with some running," but thanks to two things, I've been making definite improvements in the physiological strength area. (1) I eat enough and (2) I have to walk a mile or two every day just to get around campus, thanks to the generosity of university parking services :/

After exercising I packed some sandwiches and granola bars and we set off for Indianapolis for Video Games Live. As you might expect, this is a concert that features video game music. As you might not expect, it's a concert performed by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, as part of Gen Con. It's on Sweetie's Bucket List to attend this concert at least once in his life, so when he found out they were coming to Indy he didn't think twice before popping onto Ticketmaster to spend all the money in his Entertainment account (he actually designates fund lines for himself, whereas I'm just a miser all-around. In this respect, he would probably make a better librarian than me). The concert was performed at the Conseco Fieldhouse.


Amazingly, we found this building with relative ease despite a closed freeway exit, lousy detour signs, and the haphazard spider's web of a layout that is Indianapolis. We basically managed by picking big, wide-looking streets and following them towards the profiles of skyscrapers :p

The fieldhouse is technically a basketball stadium, but they convert it expertly into a venue for shows when the need arises.



I took these photos about a half hour before the show before the seats filled up, while the lights were still on and I could capture the stadium with some clarity. Since VGL is not only a symphony concert, but a lasers-and-bubbles-happy light show, it was impossible to take decent pictures after that. This was probably a good thing, or I would have spent the concert fiddling with my camera instead of enjoying the show.

Since we set out extra early, we were there in time to see the cosplay contest. There were Marios, Soras, and scantily clad girls aplenty.


I voted for the Ice Climbers with enormous hammers, but Dr. Who won simply by virtue of being Dr. Who.

During the concert the organizer liked to throw in little games and gimmicks, like a Frogger contest and a Guitar Hero challenge. He also liked to talk endlessly about the greatness of games and flaunt endlessly the coolness of himself, with the aid of about five different guitars and much theatrical leaping. I'd like to pretend those parts never happened. One gimmick I did like, though, was this gal here:


Laura, the flute-playing Link! She was pretty tired from singing, and had to contend with a microphone and nerve-wrecking acoustics (basketball stadiums are still basketball stadiums even if you dress them up like concert halls, after all), so she didn't quite hit a lot of notes, but the concept was fun. Here she is at another concert, in a little better form:



Sweetie was disappointed that they spent so much play time on terrible songs from World of Warcraft, God of War, and other cheap "popular" games, and didn't play a single one from Metal Gear. They also botched One Winged Angel, probably because they were all tired by that point and only had one rehearsal before the show. But I think his overall experience, like mine, was a positive one. We probably won't become one of those couples who returns year after year, but it was fun to get out in the world and surround ourselves with epicness for a night :D

Note: Going AWOL

I haven't been able to post lately for several reasons, primarily some very lengthy readings for classes and two end-of-term projects. I try to devote my very few free minutes of the day to exercise, mental rest, or time with Sweetie, which doesn't leave much room for blogging.

But never fear: those projects are due early next week, and after that I'm on "vacation" for two weeks until the fall semester starts. Since classes in the "regular" semester will have half the pace of summer ones, I don't expect my life to be nearly as hectic after this.

So until then, I leave you with this post-appropriate comic: